Sun Stuck Like Gum on a Chip of Brick

There exists now a book of poems, winner of a significant prize and the poet’s most recent authored collection, rich with images that, through their close-to-the-nose precision, serve as “optical crucibles” for a larger world, much as, in a phrase the poet could have used, “one seedling perfumes all chainlink.”

The poems often show connections as incidental — and lasting — as that seedling’s tenuous braiding, not slathering a residue of feeling over present perceptions but suggesting that retinal after-images graft onto what we currently see, as the fragrance above may outlast the seedling, seeming to emanate (in memory?) from the fence itself. Sensitive to how all illumination depends on a transitory experience, the poems often focus on vision and light, on how “late sun nibbles at the lawn, like a rabbit in a snare” (as the poet seems to write in a poem titled something like “Rapt Astringent”) and “a t-shirt of dawn wrings itself” in a lover’s hair. This sensibility treats every perception, however abstract, as sensationally empirical; perception itself becomes a variety of lust as the poet’s rapt eye fondles frayed edges into new smoothnesses:

Part of the robe stays open or not.
Sun now stays on the chipped off brick.
North of a windmill where grasses alleviate
ruts it curved many blades to harden.
How we imagine the ambient ovals
owls evaporate into ahead of their cries.

A sea you know you are in when you are.

I love how this technique foregrounds images that are precise yet disembodied, as though they are so precise, they swell to obscure the world around them; the zoomed-in image stands in for an entire landscape, preserving it, though it’s been obscured. The poet’s fragments, thus, retain the density of the larger sources they come from, but without the buffering of narrative or exposition. The poet does not reduce scenes to fit a frame but tightens the frames so you see suggestive crinkles at the edges. Things, in his work, show us ways of seeing things.

Particularly in the book’s longest sequence, this compression follows a kind of minimalism repeated until it’s monumental. Again and again, a specific and solid “touch of mud with the air in it” or “dull match-head shadow” packages a thought that briefly ends before combining molecularly with another; witnessing these quick alternations is like watching someone light one match after another, a momentary seam of darkness always between. It is a poetry of starts and stutters (“I signal again by sifting more”) that sensitively evokes the body that receives these impressions by the “febrile dinero” of their “happenscape.”

The body, thus, can seem to merge with its habitat, since we know both by a voice that, ultimately, is the poems’ sole geography. This lets a reader move through the “exposed nerve’s jawbreaker layers” of the poet’s eye, tethered to “a tongue conveying pastures of new hives in older breezes” — the result is as beautiful as that exposed nerve framed to appear like a sheet metal kite. I really wish you could see it.